


disintegration loop vi

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-09 13:13:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11669829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: in the days after: "It had felt like a dream. Now it was all being ordered in line into a dream."





	disintegration loop vi

Most of the townspeople had gathered at the station to welcome the soldiers. A little girl was holding a bouquet of small white flowers. When she handed one up to Tommy he balked from touching it. He feared he would dirty it if it touched his skin. He was urged away from the scene by a hand between his shoulders. It was the pretty boy from under the pier. “Come with me to my mam’s,” he said. 

There was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, so he did. The pretty boy had taken a flower from the little girl and put it in his lapel. When they got away from the throng they walked together though the quiet streets. After a while Tommy gave the beer that had been given him through the train window to the pretty boy because he couldn’t stomach it. The pretty boy had long ago finished his and put the bottle in a flowerbed behind a wilting bloom of red begonias. 

“That old man couldn’t hardly look us in the eye,” said the pretty boy after a moment’s silence. It seemed the beer had made him somber. 

“Which old man?” 

“At the station in Weymouth.” 

“He was blind.” 

“Was he?” 

“Yeah. He touched my face.” 

It had felt like a dream. Now it was all being ordered in line into a dream. On the train while he slept he had imagined he was inside a black box that was shrinking. 

They walked out of the city and down the country roads. A few cars went by blowing klaxons, which neither acknowledged. 

“Where’s your mam live?” 

“It’s a dairy farm. Just over the rise.” 

“And this is where you grew up?” 

“Yeah.” 

His mam was in the front turning soil over in the garden. “Alex love,” she said. So that was his name. She came up to the fence and held the filthy face in her hands. “Oh love,” she kept saying. She embrace him and rocked and Tommy looked away, embarrassed, at the drooping summer flowers. “Who’s this then,” Alex’s mam said brightly. 

He remembered Alex didn’t know. “Tom,” he said. 

They went inside for tea and biscuits. Alex told his mam the story simplified. 

“I saw in the papers,” she said, bustling about by the stove. “We was at the end of our ropes. You know Ginny from down the road. Well her son was sent off with the Navy when they requisitioned those civilian craft.” 

“Should’ve loved to be in the bloody Navy,” said Alex. 

“Not me. The U-boats.” 

“Did you see any, boys?” 

“You don’t see them…” 

“Just Luftwaffe,” said Alex. “Raining death upon us all; god knows where were the RAF…” 

“They’ve had to save it all — the Navy and the Air Force,” said Alex’s mam, watching out the window. The water was running in the faucet straight into the drain and Tommy nearly got up to turn it off. Just the sound. “For the next one,” she said. 

“Next one,” said Alex, tasting it. 

\--

There was a small room behind the hearth formerly belonging to Alex’s sister who had been called up to assemble and paint Spitfires at Cranfield. The furniture had acquired a fine and untouched layer of dust as had her music box and the fine frilly things in the closet and the chunky colorless knit throw upon the bed. Alex’s mother brought in for him a basin of warm water and a terrycloth. He sat on the bed for a while watching the horizon settle out the window until he could stand to get up and undress. His feet were a wreck of blood and blisters from running and swimming in the ill-fitting sodden boots and two of his toes were white and numb. There was a long bloody scrape up his calf he couldn’t remember acquiring. His ears were ringing. The long underwear was wet still and clammy-cold but he couldn’t stand to take it off. He was utterly petrified to be naked. He sat on the bed again and watched out the window. Eventually without taking his eyes from the window he undid the buttons at the neck and pulled his arms out of the garment and folded the top down around his waist. With the cloth he washed his collar and neck and face and under his arms. The water was quite cool now and grayish with filth. It was warm in the room but goosebumps had arisen all over his skin. For a few minutes he tried to scrub the dirt and sand out of the raw scrapes on his knuckles. Then he jumped about six feet in the air when someone knocked upon the door. 

“Tom?” It was Alex’s mother. He wrestled his arms back into the long underwear and opened the door just a crack. “I’ve found some clothes for you to sleep in,” she said gently. “How about you give me your wet things to hang?” 

\--

They sat together at the kitchen table and listened to the radio. On the BBC the announcer was saying the Navy had got 338,226 men off the beach. In the campaign for France the BEF had lost 68,000 men. Abandoned on the beach and certainly entombed now in the blowing salt spume or else requisitioned by the Nazis were guns, motorcycles, trucks, tanks, stores, ammunition, fuel; at the bottom of the Channel were 145 aircraft and 200 sea craft, including six British destroyers and three French; at least 40,000 men now were marched as prisoners of war toward Germany; 19 destroyers had been damaged, 13,000 men had been wounded, and 192,000 Allied troops remained in France and would require evacuation. 

Eventually Alex’s mother put a bottle of good scotch out on the table and two jam jars. For supper she’d made a roast with carrots from the garden which neither of them had touched. Finally she turned off the radio and went outside into the yard. When Tommy dared to look out at her she was standing with her hands on her hips watching up at the sky. 

\--

He lay in the bed in Alex’s sister’s room watching at the window. The ringing in his ears had a low pulse of breath to it now like waves breaking upon a beach. Every few minutes he clucked his tongue or snapped his fingers in hopes that the sound would break it but nothing would. It was his blood moving inside him, he realized finally. He should be grateful to it as proof he was alive at whatever cost. 

On the beach they had snatched sleep wherever they could and more than once he had woken up with the rising tide like blood in his mouth, lifting his hair and his clothes. As though he were dead already and it endeavored to carry him as so many others away. He would sit up and let the water eddy around him in the depressions the tide had drawn about his hips and knees. The gestural shape of his body in the sand suggestive of some vague and impossible permanence — the carven embossed echo of the monument that would not be built once the lines broke and the bottleneck shut. Once they were herded into the belly of some doomed vessel from which they would not escape. Once a bullet or a bit of flak or shrapnel found this last and most sacred target. Once their hearts or minds gave out figuratively or literally and they walked at last into the ocean to chance their fate to swim. 

Through the window the lights of the city were just visible beyond the rise in a steady charcoal blush. From the beach he had watched Dunkirk light up beyond the line of French rear guard in a great electric shattering like a distant storm generating its own lightning and thunder and never any rain but the sea spray breaking and blowing cold blood-slaked salt up the beach. It had been running now down the back of his neck as some supernatural ectoplasmic visitor since they had disembarked the sailboat at Weymouth and it had been with him in his dream on the train inside the black box and it was with him now in this bed and this room as it would be in every bed and every room for all his life: flak clattering-chattering in the old streets blowing apart silence, the overhead orchestral tremolo of engines manifest out of the sun’s white eye and the black rubber smoke, above/below it all the roar which was one roar which was his own heartbeat and the oncoming tide. 

\--

He dreamed there was a light above him in the darkness which he reached and reached for but could not touch. Something was holding him down by the ankle. Around him the darkness was tightening and unlike the other hardly yet remembered it was warm. 

He was striving toward the light desperately. His heel met something live which recoiled. He imagined it was the tentacle of some unfathomable undersea creature but knew it wasn’t. He detached a clutching hand from the wrist of his uniform like one of the strange pale starfishes his father’s fishing nets had pulled in on accident every now and again. It reached for him and there was no body left of it. It reached and reached for him and at last it closed over his face — 

A hand at his collar jerked him into the world. It was Alex who was sat on the edge of the bed. “You’ll wake me mam,” he whispered loudly. 

“What?” 

“Shouting and that. Bloody hell.” 

“I was — ”

“Yes.” He didn’t elaborate. Tommy pushed himself up on the heels of his hands and sat. He felt like an invalid in the small neat bed. “It’s the bloody Frenchman isn’t it,” said Alex. With a strange care he let go the collar of Tommy’s shirt. 

“Just the water.” 

“Liar.” This in the sharp cruel voice with which he had questioned the Frenchman in the Dutch vessel. “You said you wouldn’t mind it,” Alex said. He was looking past Tommy’s ear at the rough bedframe. “You said you’d live with it if we threw him out.” 

That had been thirty-six hours ago. It was wound up inside him like a coiled rope beginning to fray. It was another world now. Any of us, someone kinder may have said, any of us would have done anything to get off the beach. As if we might ever truly and completely get off the beach. 

“D’you think he — in the fire?” 

“Before. In the boat somehow I dunno. He was behind me and then.” 

The boy on the beach watching tearfully over the barefoot corpse. It had seemed an almost painterly tableau of incredible regret and tenderness. Tommy had been running at that point since 10 May and he had killed three German soldiers at close enough range to smell their breath and many others at a distance which seemed, disconcertingly, to not matter as much or be as real, and he had sat with his squadron’s desperately wounded medic maintaining practiced pressure on a neck wound while the sergeant administered a fatal dose of morphine. He had washed his hands of the blood in a filthy puddle beneath a church’s bombed-out clocktower. A three-legged dog came limping over to him and licked his face. The towns and cities were empty and echoed with staggered gunshots ricocheting in the old stone. By the time his squadron made it to Dunkirk there were five of them remaining; they had no commanding officer; he did not know three of their names; he hadn’t eaten in two days; the medic was dead, his heart wouldn't slow down, he couldn’t sleep, he forgot himself sometimes. And then the boy on the beach burying the barefoot corpse. And then the boy under the pier they had pulled bodily out of the sucking riptide of the sinking hospital ship. 

He had not known their names either, and now he would never know the Frenchman’s name. For their parts they had not known his. He had considered them as little more than a means to an end and they had considered him the same. And such was war. 

“Better than the fire,” Tommy said. 

“What’s that?” 

“Drowning. Better than the fire.” 

He was going to keep his head under, he remembered. Seeing it — the wash of gold and light through the thick murky green, through the pitch on the water. 

“What are they going to do with us now?” Alex whispered. 

They watched each other warily in the un-light, knowing the answer. “We shall fight them on the beaches,” Tommy said finally. 

“I can’t wait for it any longer. It feels — ” 

“Like a coiled up rope coming apart.” 

Alex was watching him now, his eye, his lower lip. He lowered his voice even further when he spoke like a penitent at confession. “When I shut my eyes I was still in the blue boat with the water coming in through the hull trying to hold the tide back. So this feels like another — another trying to hold the tide back and as useless.” His eyes were red and nervous in the moonlight through the window. Tommy couldn’t respond in embarrassment at his own emotion. “Say something,” Alex said, louder now, “damn you.” 

It feels like I will be running for the rest of my life, he tried to say, couldn’t say. He looked to Alex desperately and Alex lunged for him. At first he thought it was a blow and recoiled; it was a blow, but it was also a kiss. But the kiss more like teeth and the other mouth salt and swallowing. The fire on the surface of the sea. Another heart clambering against his own to climb out of the body through the mouth toward the light. 

He struggled at first and eventually found this surrender more manageable than death’s. This other body covering his as some shield against the memory of barrage. He had felt in that place possessed by a spirit which had compelled him to live. It was his own and not his own. It was so deeply innate to his self that he had never known it before. And yet it came rising into his throat until it saw through his eyes. 

This was perhaps the same or another similar. He knelt in the bed and felt Alex touch him. The chest against his back through layers of thin fabric heaving breath against his neck and his jaw and he remembered with a sudden electrifying shock that he had lived. 

It was quick, rough, hurt a lot, also the best thing he had ever felt. Afterward they lay in the narrow dark bed breathing. He fell asleep again and dreamed until nothing turned itself into the spume blowing raggedly up the beach dragging its white shroud over everything it touched. Occasionally he woke fitfully to realize he and Alex were clinging to one another like the last survivors of the shattered wreck of civilization itself. 

\--

He woke at dawn and disentangled himself quietly from the other body. Then he went outside in the long nightshirt and found his uniform on the clothesline. The wool had dried stiffly in the night filthy and creased as it was with pitch and sand and salt. The fabric was still clammy with the old seawater and the dew. When he had dressed he started off walking on the road to town. Alex’s mam came running after him in slippers, calling his name, and handed him a parcel of fresh scones wrapped in a dishcloth. She embraced him for a long time and then he walked on again. 

\--

He was sent to Libya and was wounded in the arm, evacuated to hospital in Leicester, stitched up, rehabilitated, and deployed again at Sword Beach, 6 June 1944. Four years almost precisely to the day after he had left the beach at Dunkirk. His regiment seized Caen and it was there that he lost the arm which had been wounded in Libya. 

On 21 October 1944 he went to the cottage to return Alex’s mother’s dishcloth only to find that she did not live there anymore and in fact that no one lived there anymore. A fire had been set in the middle of the kitchen floor at some point by squatters and the walls were blackened with smoke. On the way back to town he was stopped by a woman motorist who offered him a ride and then dinner in her basement flat round the corner from the train station. She was widowed and her only child had wrecked his Spitfire outside Strasbourg early in ’43 and had never been heard from again. 

“I’m looking for an infantryman who was with me at Dunkirk,” he told her over coffee after the spartan meal. “He lived up over the hill with his mother and sister on a dairy farm — ”

“Alex Royce. Yes, Bonnie’s gone to live with Steph in Birmingham…” 

“What about Alex?” 

“I don’t know. He might still be over there.” 

Sometimes he forgot it was still going on. “Right,” he said. 

He left on the night train for Essex where he had gotten work ciphering for a weapons manufacturer. The woman had given him a parcel of biscuits wrapped in another dishcloth. He thought about writing a letter for general delivery to Bonnie Royce in Birmingham and he went so far as to dig his notebook and a pencil out of his pack but then he decided against it. 

He had remembered it for years as the very last of it. It had been some final notion of that other mind. It wasn’t so much that it was washed out of him then as it was closed inside a box which was stacked somewhere in the back of his mind to prevent his opening it. Sometimes he remembered it happening on the beach or in the cabin of the Dutch vessel while the tide rose around them in encompassing arms. Other times he reasoned it was a thing men did at war, in extremity, in desperation, in expression of some wordless bond. Which was to say he did a lot of reasoning about it. He had reasoned about it whilst lying under his itchy wool blanket in the wide and still Libyan desert watching at the stars for a sign and he had reasoned about in the field hospital in Caen whilst the private who had saved his life in the streets tightened the tourniquet around his shoulder and the medic prepared a dose of morphine. He had reasoned about it in dreams. Eventually his ears stopped ringing the sound of the beach and started ringing the whistling of the bombs overhead and the wind in the desert. The tinny whisper of sand blowing off old landmines. War subsumed. He had come to understand that there was no reasoning about the things it did. He watched the generals and MPs on television speak floridly about order and strength. He thought they had not chalked enough whatsoever up to weakness and chaos. 

In London he slept on a bench in Kings Cross and waited for the 5am to Colchester. From the train he watched the sun come up over hill and vale. Eventually he wrote a letter he would never send. 

**Author's Note:**

> this story is named after [this ambient piece](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UBWgeSJlWw&t) by william basinski. i'm [here on tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/).


End file.
